


The Way We Get By

by domenicapm



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Reichenbach, feeeeeeeeeeels, sorry no smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 00:38:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domenicapm/pseuds/domenicapm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a madman in your bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way We Get By

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the lovely retrogrademercury for taking on beta duties!

_There is a madman in your bed._

 

_"I love you so much, I want to bite you," he says, and for a moment, you find yourself thinking he actually might. His lips, after all, hover right next to your left ear, and he's remarked before that the ear is such a very convenient little flap of skin and cartilage. Instead, however, he only pauses thoughtfully before going on, "I want to sink my teeth in to you and find out how tough you are on the inside, John, what you feel like under your skin." The words, combined with the heady rumble of his voice and his thoughtful, speculative tone, send a ripple of either apprehension or anticipation down your spine. You're really not sure which it is, and you really don't care to think too deeply on the matter, anyway._ **  
  
** _Anyone else would run away, as far and as fast as they could, after hearing something like that from a self-confessed sociopath. Actually, most people would have run the moment the sociopath uttered the word "sociopath" that very first time. And yet, here you are, sharing not only a flat, but currently a bed with said sociopath._ **  
  
** _(The bed-sharing is--not exactly normal, but has happened enough since his return that you know exactly how to arrange all the assorted limbs in a way that is comfortable for both parties. Infrequently, ever since he'd come back, Sherlock has sought physical contact in the midst of the morose moods he sometimes falls into. Sometimes it's just nodding off against your shoulder in front of the telly, sometimes it's his thigh pressed against yours in the back seat of a cab, sometimes it's frigid toes pressed into the soles of your feet and cold fingers burning their way through your t-shirt in the middle of the night. This time, Sherlock had already been burrowed beneath your sheets and duvet when you got home from the surgery, a development that had actually comforted you immensely as he had spent the last three days in one of his torpors, uncommunicative and listless and probably on the verge of some mental breakdown.)_ **  
  
** _"John, do remember to breathe," he says calmly, and then, as you draw in a steady of-course-I-was-holding-it-on-purpose breath, he asks, "Not good?"_ **  
  
** _It's to the point that you don't know anymore, no longer even have context for_ good _and_ bad _, at least not as they might relate to social conventions._ **  
  
** **“** _Just... surprising, that's all,” you say. And then, before you remember that petulance is his forte, not yours, you add, “I really loathe you sometimes.”_ **  
  
** _A dismissive snort. “No, you don't. Really, John. Number one, you should be past being surprised by anything I do or say anymore. Number two, you can't honestly be surprised by this.” You wait. “It's been six months, John. Four years since we met.”_ **  
  
** _Four years? “Can't be,” you say._ **  
  
** **“** _Of course it is,” he replies, in the tone that suggests that he's still infallible, thankyouverymuch, and he sounds so affronted that you laugh in spite of yourself. “What?”_ **  
  
** **“** _I thought we'd both be dead before now,” you tell him, breathless with laughter until you remember how long you spent thinking he_ was _dead, and then it's not funny anymore. He rests his chin on your shoulder and you feel his fingers curling into the fabric of your T-shirt, and you can't help it, you ask, “If you love me, then why did you let me think...?”_ **  
  
**The funeral had been the third most difficult day of your life. In a lot of ways, it still seems more real than his homecoming: You can still nearly smell the damp of earth at the Holmes family plot; can still feel the icy, sharp grief emanating from Mummy Holmes’ veiled figure; can hear Mycroft’s unnaturally strained-sounding voice as he delivered the brief eulogy. You remember knotting his scarf, which he’d unwound from his neck and given to you before you’d left him that fateful day, around the lowest branch of an oak tree next to the Holmes family tomb; you still remember how very blue and fine it looked against the dark, rough bark of the tree. He had been irritated about that, years later, when he showed back up. “I gave you my scarf because it was cold out and you’d never buy anything so nice for yourself, John,” he said, when you’d told him about it. You wondered, then, how you’d forgiven him so quickly. **  
  
** _A deep sigh gusts past your ear. “Because, at first, I didn't realise it. I didn't realise what it would do to either of us. And then, once I knew, I didn't want to endanger you. And because... I knew if I even so much as spoke to you, there would be nothing in the world to stop me coming back to you, and then I'd never leave, ever again.”_ **  
  
** _All you can say is “Oh,” because your mind is tripping down that path again, back to the fateful day four years ago when he looked at you with that gleam in his eye and gave you the promise that it “Could be dangerous!” and you still can't figure it out, why you didn't run. You think it was probably the fear that if you went away, he'd follow you—or maybe the fear that he wouldn't. And you have to stop yourself in your own tracks, there, to focus on the steady rhythm of his heart beating through his thin chest against your back, the rise and fall of his breath and the warmth of it against your cheek._ **  
  
**You managed to hate him vehemently for about two months, and then you came home after another session with your therapist—which you spent awkwardly dodging her questions—to find Mycroft sitting in your chair, his umbrella propped next to it, Sherlock’s violin across his knees. It was not what you needed to see that day, and when Mycroft looked up and said, “You know, you really should _talk_ to your therapist; it would make therapy so much more _effective_ ,” you snapped at him to shut up and asked, “Why are you even here? To get some of your brother’s things?” **  
  
**Mycroft’s expression actually softened for a brief moment as he picked up the violin and set it gently, almost reverently, in its case, which lay open on the table before him. “Goodness, no,” he said. “His things belong to you now. You can do with them whatever you see fit.” You couldn’t read his face just then. He was looking down at the violin in its case, really concentrating on snapping it closed, and he ran one hand gently over its lid after he had finished, and you almost thought he was someone else entirely in that moment, as if a channel on some cosmic telly had been flipped suddenly and you were peering at somebody normal. **  
  
**Then, he looked up, cleared his throat, and it was efficient, brisk, _hateful_ Mycroft Holmes sitting in your living room once more. “You were Sherlock’s closest—and only—friend,” he said, in his familiar brusque tone. “Sherlock would have wanted you taken care of in the event of his... passing.” He drew a bankbook from an inside pocket of his overcoat, set it gently on the violin case, and said, “Sherlock came into quite a bit of money when he turned eighteen. He wanted you to have it, and I had all the accounts transferred to your name. Everything’s in here, but feel free to contact me if you have any questions.” **  
  
**You couldn’t even react until he had gone, and even then it took a few moments for the walls to crumble. You felt the familiar cold burn of anger, felt your jaw clench at the injustice of it all. ( _Y_ _ou went and got yourself killed, Sherlock, and you left me here and now I’m useless again, oh so very useless, and now I have the added problem of your things, and god, you’ve got yourself killed and now the world is so flat and colourless again, and how the bloody hell am I going to cope, you selfish bastard?)_ It was the same place you'd been for two months, as familiar as finding your way around the flat in the darkness of three A.M. You couldn't even look at the little black bankbook attop the violin case, so instead you glanced around the sitting room and thought about the mess (Sherlock's papers and the case files that sherlock had pilfered from Scotland Yard, and Sherlock's books about botany and poisons and, inexplicably, beekeeping) that still needed to be cleaned up. ( _It’s not a bloo_ _dy shrine_ , you thought, _I have to live here._ And then, of course, _I don’t have to live here, I could move_ , though you knew you never would.) **  
  
**And, with that realization, some dam inside you broke and you felt sharp, fresh grief burst forth. And here you thought that somewhere amongst sibling estrangement and bombs going off and all the close calls, you had forgotten how to cry. You still have no idea how long you let yourself cry, just that you eventually collapsed into your chair and that it was dark outside by the time that you lifted your head. **  
  
** _Even now, you feel the totality of that grief—sharper than an echo, keener than the ache in your shoulder on damp days, though it’s been over three years._ **  
  
** **“** _It hurt,” you tell him. “It hurt a lot, Sherlock.”_ **  
  
** **“** _I know,” he says, and you think,_ If he says that it hurt him too, if he brings it back round to himself, I will punch him.  _Instead, he says, “I’m sorry, John,” and sounds like he actually means it this time._ **  
  
**You’d like to think that things got better after that, and maybe they did, marginally. You returned to the land of the living, after a fashion. The mess strewn about the sitting room and kitchen went into boxes or the rubbish bin, or was dragged back to the Yard. The boxes never made it past Sherlock’s room. You stripped the bed linens and bagged his suits, you stacked boxes upon boxes around the perimeter of the room, and then you closed the door. (Another thing for Sherlock to be annoyed over upon his return. “Really, John?” he had said, as though he’d just stepped out to have a cigarette and come back in to find his life boxed up. A deep sigh, and then, “It’s going to take me _ages_ to sort through all of this. There’s no way you filed any of it properly.”) A part of you knew that it would make more sense to move all of it to the attic, or to your room, and take his room, but you couldn’t. **  
  
**You went back to work, or you tried. Sarah had to fire you after the third time you went for a walk during your lunch break and failed to come back. A few weeks of unemployment and spending too much time with Mrs. Hudson passed before Lestrade showed up, offering you a position as a consulting physician. You suspected Mycroft’s involvement, but were too grateful at being rescued from crap telly and book club meetings to protest much. It was something to do, after all; some way to feel useful. **  
  
**Nights were always the worst. You often caught yourself lying awake listening for crashes in the kitchen, or jolted awake at three in the morning after you’d imagined hearing your name whispered from the threshold of your room. It had happened so often when Sherlock was around ( _when Sherlock was_ alive, you had to remind yourself) that it was almost like a muscle memory, something you did instinctively. **  
  
**You couldn’t even hate him anymore, not after you realised it was you keeping the ghost of him around. **  
  
** **“** _John,” he says again, insistently, pulling you back to now. “John. What are we going to do now?”_ **  
  
** _You close your eyes. “Well, first of all, you’re going to promise never to let me think you’re dead, ever again,” you say drily. “No more pitching off the roofs of buildings while grappling with criminal masterminds.”_ **  
  
** _He says nothing but reaches over you to close his fingers around your wrist._ **  
  
**The day he came back—you don’t remember much of it. Mostly just being bumped into on the street by someone who you would still swear was several inches shorter and several pounds heavier than Sherlock. You looked into his face, heard him say “John!” with an urgency that pulled at your very soul, and then everything went black. **  
  
**You opened your eyes on the sitting room at Baker Street. He’d somehow gotten you up seventeen very steep stairs and onto the sofa, slipped your jacket off and unbuttoned the collar of your shirt. One hand cradled the back of your neck; the other grasped your wrist. On his face were written worry and concern such as you’d never seen before, which quickly flicked to relief. **  
  
** **“** John? John, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would affect you so... _well,_ I didn’t think it would affect you,” he said, and he sounded so genuinely surprised and pleased by the concept that for a moment, you couldn’t decide whether to kiss him or punch him. **  
  
**From the very next moment, it seemed, life reverted back to the running-jumping-shooting-mostly-running routine that the two of you had held before Sherlock’s... hiatus. Your existence once more consisted of breathless chases through dark alleys, hours of poring over dull reference tomes on Chinese pottery, running (clumsy) reconnaissance when Sherlock couldn’t or wouldn’t be arsed to do it himself, late-night Chinese in tiny, steamy corner takeaway shops, under fluorescent lights that made everyone look jaundiced and insomniac. It was once more a series of cab rides; twenty-quid notes pressed into grimy palms; Styrofoam cups of bitter black Yard coffee; rows at four in the morning when you were both tired and cranky and Sherlock wanted to drag you to yet another abandoned warehouse. ****  
  
It was both of you studiously avoiding talking about petty things like devotion and affection and love, even as Sherlock insinuated himself back into your flat, your routine, and, possibly worst of all, your bed.

_And you love him so much it hurts, and you love him so much that nothing can ever hurt you again, so long as he's near you._ ****  
  
**“** _John?” he asks, his lips brushing your ear again. “For all it's worth, I promise to never leave you again.”_

_Suddenly, you don't care if he bites you. Love has never been kind to Sherlock Holmes, after all; most recently it got him (nearly) killed. Love is dangerous, an unpredictable variable, so it makes sense that Sherlock would treat it like an interesting but unstable experiment, would want to pull it apart and examine it. “Second,” you say, rolling over to face him finally, searching his weird, almost-alien, pale eyes, “no, never mind. There's no second thing. Just don't leave me again, and you can do whatever you like with me, bite me, take me apart piece by piece, put me back together wrong--and it still won't hurt half as much as you leaving me."_ **  
**

_Sherlock looks as though he doesn't know what to say, and instead he pulls you close and kisses you, mouth warm and wet and tasting of tea and chocolate, and when his arms close around you, you think,_ Well, that's  good as "I'm sorry," it's as good as "I love you."

_When he pulls back, finally, you can still the see the uncertainty in his face, so you tuck his head and murmur, "It's all right, Sherlock, it's fine. We'll be fine." And you hope that it's as good as "I forgive you," and as good as "I love you."_   


****  
  


 


End file.
